


Papa Can You Hear Me

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Daddy WarHux, Dark, Escort Rey-baby, F/M, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Modern AU, Romance, Size Difference, Smut, Unplanned Pregnancy, mentions of past sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-04 11:01:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17897195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: She loves him. That’s what makes this so devastating.She loves him.





	1. What's a girl like you doing in a fairytale like this?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lanisita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lanisita/gifts).



> Was I supposed to be working on "I shall be a blue sky", "No Ordinary Stars", or my first original work? Yes. Am I sorry about it? No.
> 
> For Lani. This whole fixation is your fault. 
> 
> And for Mister. It's you, Papa. It's always been, always is, always will be. You.

Rey _hates_ confrontation.

Well… that’s a bit of a fib, innit? What’s Tage telling her all the time about fibbing? Oh yeah.

_Lying is a sin._

Her knee bounces under the bistro table on the small, sunken patio of the artsy coffee shop she’s picked for their little chat. It's the one on her side of town, in Brixton, between Jack Street and Firth, in the basement under the Indie record store and the place that sells handmade pottery and hemp cross-body bags.

Tage hates this place. Says it reminds him he’s _old._

The wind picks up, fluttering the trailing ends of the wandering Jew vine that overflows the wrought iron planters lining the patio on three sides. It’s lower than street level, railed off to keep pedestrians from tumbling in. The vines are a lush, fertile green, dotted with cigarette butts and gum wrappers and sweet pale-yellow flowers that could care less if they were born in an urban hardscape, for how much they love the sun.

She cups her still-warm mug of tea with five sugars and hunkers down around it, leg bouncing faster. The laces on her high-tops have come undone, her knees are cold where they peer out through the artful rips in her acid-wash jeans. September in London’s too cool for a crop top, but here she is, with her cozy thick flannel tied off under her bellybutton piercing instead of huddled around her shoulders like a saneable person. Because the nineties, yeah?

Wait. Where was she?

Oh yeah. _Confrontation._

It’s not something she usually shies away from. In fact, she’s a bit famous for mad-doggin’ people. Jerks, mainly. And a few twats. Yesterday she dressed down a driver for nearly mowing her over in the crossing lane. Yeah, he had the green light and all. But still, _Watch where you’re goin’, yah silly stupid wanker!_

Just normal rage-type stuff.

She’s small and inconsequential, so she likes to bark, to let people know she’s there _._ She doesn’t want to get forgotten.

Tage doesn’t like it. He says it’s classless and _uncouth_ , the way she behaves. He husks it more like, into her ear once he’s got her naked as a newborn kitten and bent over the arm of his dark leather armchair, suspended over the seat from her hair in his fist, making her breath catch and her little breasts bob pitiful-like each time he shoves his big fat cock all the way to her womb. _Such shocking language, young lady. Whatever shall I do with you, hm? Shall I come in your pretty little cunny? Would that teach you a lesson, my dove?_

_Yes Papa, please! Please please please please please-_

Which brings her to her next point.

Much as she might love tearin’ the mickey outta some wrongful bloke, she _hates_ fighting with Armitage. It twists her guts and wrings her chest so tight she feels like she can’t breathe at all. Her hands shake, all the blood in her body seems to tingle in her fingers and in the tips of her toes. Sometimes she throws up.

Not because he barks back – he’s too _educated_ and _courtly_ to behavior in such a _barbaric_ manner – but because of how he looks at her when she rocks up and slaps him just to see if he’ll whap her back. Or when she snaps in his face for no reason. Or when she screams at him in the tube station in front of about a bajillion people.

For getting a text from a female.

Who turned out to be his mum.

He looks like she’s broken his heart.

“Jesus wept,” she moans, propping her elbows on the lattice wrought iron around her tea mug and holding her head in her hands. Both her legs are now jittering under the table. She wants to jump off the face of the Earth and disappear into the sun.

She wants a ciggie.

“Rey Niima, you are the worthless-est, stupidest bloody fuck-up,” she whimpers. “Such a silly stupid cow-”

 _Now now, cherished. None of that,_ she hears his tender rebuke.

Hot tears leak under her lashes and slip past her fingers. They race down her wrists and plunk softly into her tea, making the surface ripple like a tiny tea-ocean. She sniffles and wipes her nose on the back of her hand.

It’s cool in the shadow of the tall old building. She chose a table with no umbrella facing the concrete steps that lead down to the patio, hoping to soak in the last dredges of the sun. But its at the wrong angle, slanting its rose-hued light across the building tops into the street beside her, missing her by just a few meters. It’s late in the afternoon on a Tuesday, she had to pick a time after he gets off work. His office is uptown, in one of them big glossy buildings where everyone’s got an email signature and a _higher education._ Tage, for example, has a Master’s in civil engineering. Got it while he was building up his career with the military. First the British Royal Air Force, then SAS, then the Ministry of Defense. And now he's chief director.

She can barely read.

“Fresh cuppa, peanut?” one of the baristas asks her. He’s her usual, a short, dark and handsome with a smart crew cut and a killer smoky eye. He batts his lash extensions, his manicure clicks soothingly at the empty tray in his hands.

“No thanks,” she flashes him a fledgling smile.

"Cheer up then, will yah?" he gives her a saucy wink and a saucier tone that might a’made her grin, if she hadn’t spotted a shadow descending the concrete stairs to the patio outta the corner of her eye.

Like the river at night, her bloke pours black as pitch down the stairs in his elegant suit and long wool coat. The swath of sunlight striking above the patio transforms his crisp hairstyle to sheets of gold velum, until he steps down out of its reach and his coloring becomes living copper, violent and vibrant against their September surroundings. His gaunt cheeks are flushed slightly, no doubt from his brisk walk from the underground; they flex in a way that highlights just how angular and deep-set his features are.

Her breath catches, hand to Jesus, and her heart turns over like a guttering engine. Her belly flip-flaps, her little cunny clenches and gulps.

No, he’s not handsome, her bloke. He is _mythical_ , like something outta the pretty picture books he keeps on the coffee table in his fancy uptown flat, of gods and goddesses from the old times. Like he’s come up from Hades looking for some pretty flower-picking virgin to snatch up and feed a bunch of fruit to so she’ll stay with him forever. He looks dangerous and everlasting.

To her, he looks like home.

Her heart skips and pounds as she warbles to her feet to meet him. He sweeps quickly across the concrete in smooth, lordly strides, his expensive great coat spread out like buzzard wings behind him. She thinks if she could live to be a thousand, she’d never love a man more in all her life.

Then she’s not thinking at all, because he takes her into his arms.

No man on God’s Earth can kiss like Armitage.

His arm locks behind her waist and his long gloved hand holds her face as his tongue parts her lips. Time stops. The camera spins. A piano in her mind plinks classical music as he slides warm and slick down her welcoming throat. He tastes like strong cinnamon mints and clove cigarettes, like coffee and professional success. She slants her head and suckles him, loving how his big hand gropes her ass through her jeans and flannel, how he presses into her until a ten pound note couldn’t slip between them. She holds the lapels of his coat like she’ll never let him go.

She loves him.

That’s what makes this so devastating.

She _loves_ him.

“ ‘lo,” she says shyly, after their lips finally apart. The sound of their kiss echoes through the patio. People watch. It’s not every day they see two people so wrong for each other look so right together.

God, his eyes are _gorgeous,_ cold and warm at the same time. He’s an iguana, her Tage. Or a stigma. Whatever the word is for a beautiful complexable mysterious wonder.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asks, looking frownly down at her little navel all covered in goosebumps. He rubs her arms, his strong hands gentle and warm through his leather gloves. His eyes are still on her bellybutton, his long finger trails wonderingly between her breasts to tickle her piercing – a sparkly zipper – before he starts to shrug out of his coat.

“I’m alright,” she says weakly, even as his heat envelopes her. She’s surrounded by the scent of his expensive aftershave and clove cigarettes and ink pens and leather. As she nuzzles the collar with the tip of her cold little nose, her mind plays word associations. _Father lover comfort sleep sex ginger tea safe love-_

She bursts into tears.

“My darling,” he calls her, distressed because she’s _distraught_. He gathers her up in his arm and strokes his glove over her trembling treble of buns, shushing and clucking softly like a nobleman in a miniseries put on by the BBC. That’s who he reminds her of. Mister Darcy.

Only she’s no Elizabeth Bennet. More like her prettier, stupider baby sister, the one who ruins her life before it’s ever begun.

Because that’s what she’s done, innit? Gone and cocked it all up.

She cries harder into his chest.

The last three days have been blue murder, living with this all on her own. He likes to see her everyday now, has since they took up together, really, but she couldn’t bear to see him, or to hear his voice on the phone. She didn’t think she could keep it together.

She’s doing a crackin’ job, now.

“I’m sorry,” she croaks, sniffling and gulping back her sobs. Her shoulders shudder, breath coming in hitched starts and stops. She’s left a silvery trail of snot on his impeccable dress shirt.

_Shit fuck bollocks-_

“Not at all,” he assures her, thumbing back her tears. His leather feels so warm and comforting against her cheek. Like when he spreads her over his lap and pushes two gloved fingers inside her, holding her head tipped back against his chest so he can look down directly into her eyes as he tells her, _You are so beautiful. My precious girl. Come for Papa, now._

Her heart squeezes. He’ll never hold her again after-

“Rey? You’re beginning to worry me, angel.”

“S-sorry-” she chokes on her grief and her own spit and clears her throat. Her stomach churns. Black dots bloom by the billions across her eyes.

Her hands wring in his suit jacket as she sways under the weight of his great coat. “Can we sit down?”

“I insist.”

He helps her by holding her hand and smoothing down his coat behind her before he settles her into her chair. He tucks it up gently in to the table, legs scraping at the brickwork, like he’s propping up a dolly for teatime. He seats himself gracefully across from her and clicks his fingers twice to signal the barista.

Normally she’d chide him for that. Now she slumps and cradles her cold cuppa between her hands.

“A Darjeeling and a Cantonese chai, please. And an ashtray,” he adds, handing over a ten-note.

The barista cracks his chewing gum. “Back in two shakes, sugar-lamb.”

Tage blinks but lets it slide.

He’s got more importantable things to worry about.

Like the girl quietly crying into her tea across the table.

He lights a cigarette from the engraved silver case he always carries with him, then folds his hand on top of the table. Its light scent drifts over her, calming and warm.

“Would you like one?” he asks before he puts the case away.

She shakes her head without looking him in the eyes. “Can’t.”

_This is it, Rey. You can do this. One fell swoop-like. Get it out and be done._

The silence drags on like a net cast behind a chug boat, catching all kinds of slick, slippery thoughts in its web. What if he hollers? What if he strikes her? What if he tries to make her have-

She flinches.

“Rey, my darling,” he thumbs his forehead. Disbelievably, a strand of his hair has come loose from its tightly-quaffed style. It flutters like a bit of gold thread. “I wish you’d tell me what's-”

“I’m pregnant.”

_There. One fell swoop._

That’s the only way to kill the thing you love. Quick as you can.

“I see,” he says, obviously stunned.

He starts to say something else, but the barista is back with an ashtray and two steaming chipped mugs of tea. He murmurs a _thank you_ , something he wouldn’t have bothered with before he met her, and immediately stubs out his cigarette. In an absent, mindless motion, he waves the smoke away from her.

She watches it waft over the patio in long, curling tendrils that separate and disappear.

“How far along?” he asks quietly.

That surprises her. For a moment, she struggles to remember how words work.

“Dunno,” she shrugs finally, studying the wavering ends of a wandering Jew. She still can’t look at him. “Only took the test on Saturday. I’d been late like, three weeks? I don’t normally notice but it’d been a while and when I stopped to think ‘bout it I realized it’d been so long. Thought about it on Friday but the box said it was best to take the test in the morning. Your pee’s like, more concentrated then, or somethin’?”

Poker-faced, he nods.

“So yeah, I waited til Saturday morning.”

“I assume you took more than one?” his voice is thick, and soft.

 _I want to be your only lover,_ he’d told her once, in that very same voice, when they first got together. Straight into her ear, with his big body settled between her straining thighs, his cock so deep she could feel its tip kiss her heart. _I want to be your lover for all time._

Her lip wobbles. She holds it between her teeth and swallows back her sob.

 _What’s done is done_ , her case worker-of-the-month used to say. Every time one of her foster-fathers would creep into her room at night and make her wish she was sleeping in a treehouse on a deserted island like a Swiss Family Robinson, or dead. Every time she bounced back to social services with yet another bit of her soul missing, someone would say, without looking up from her keyboard, _What’s done is done._

“Yeah,” she says, wiping her snot on the sleeve of his great coat before she realizes what she’s done. She stares into the black surface of her Darjeeling as her stomach twists and turns. She thinks she might throw up. “I took ‘em all actually. All that was in the box.”

Every one of their tiny windows had said the same thing.

_Fucked._

“I see,” he repeats.

The gas lamps across the street flare to life with a _click-hiss_ , triggered by the first wash of night pouring over the city. Down the walkway above the sunken patio, a group of girls in prep-uniforms chatter excitedly as they wait for the crossing light. They’re only a few years younger than she is. One of them clutches her girlfriend’s arm before throwing her head back and laughing up at the night.

Rey slots her fingertips through the latticed iron around her cuppa, concentrating on the feeling of cold as her chest burns breathless and hot. A breeze sighs over the patio, waving the little pale-faced flowers of the vines. They smile innocent and unknowing up at the twilight, sweet as newborn babes.

She thinks of the life inside of her.  _Least I'll never be alone._

“Well.” He stands. His chair scrapes lightly along the brick. He adjusts his cuffs around his wrists and clears his throat.

 _This is it,_ she clings to the table, as the crest of the tidal wave arcs and roars over her. She prays it smashes her in one clean swoop.

He goes down on one knee beside the table.

 

 

 

 

Wait, back up.

That’s not the beginning.


	2. Bought a hundred dollar bottle of champagne like me, Just to pour that mother fucker down the drain like me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four months before...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo, what happened to the chapter count, Pastel? Huh, what's up with that?

His flat is in Chelsea proper, in a borough common folk call _the_ _royals_ , on account of it used to be palaces and big fancy townhomes for the country noblemen and aristocratic-types back in the pre-war days. It’s a historical building, some duke’s old manor, and her john owns the entire top floor. Most of the original ornaments are still intact, things like crystal chandeliers and thick plaster moldings of mermaids and cherubs painted gold, frescoes of the old parks in autumn and glowing hardwoods the likes of which can’t be bought anymore for how rare the trees are. Its eastern windows face Saint Luke’s Church, overlooking the pretty courtyard surrounded by flower gardens.

On clear mornings like this one, while her john is up and about getting ready for work, she likes to slip into the drawing room and open the window near the piano and kneel down on the red-and-gold ornamental rug, with her arms folded on the gilded window sill, and watch the sun bloom over the church spires and wash the shadows blush-white. When the breeze blows, she can smell the jasmine still blooming through the twilight, and freesia, and hyacinth, and the coppery-clean scent of wet pennies in the bottom of the wishing pond drifting up from the courtyard. And she can hear the shrill bustle and growl of the delivery lorries driving by, and the twitter of birds waking up from their sleeps, and the ringing of the church bells.

It’s her idea of heaven, and she never wants to leave it.

“Ah, there you are.” He says it ever so quiet-like.

Still, she startles before she turns. As if she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t.

Can soaking in someone else’s happiness be called stealing, she wonders.

He’s leaning on the door frame that leads to the dining room, hands in the pocks of his slacks, looking sharp and imperial in a dark navy suit and blue tie. Something like warmth touches the corners of his eyes from watching her watch the world wake up. Against the backdrop of fancy gilded moldings and smooth pastel walls, long damask drapes and expensive antiques, he looks like a man off the cover of a magazine. Or from a movie about love affairs between different classes, maybe. The kind that makes her clutch her pillow and cry but she watches anyway because she loves the way they hurt her heart.

The sunlight wafting up over the cathedral top drenches her in pale rose-colored light, turning the bits of hair that have fallen from her braid around her face from brown to gold. It makes her large round eyes shine like starlight, and the dust particles that hang in the air all around her twinkle like magic. The long white nightgown she’s wearing, the kind with ribbons on the collar and lace at the cuffs that he likes to tear from her young body when he’s excited, sheers out even in this faint light, so that every detail of her is visible as if through a veil.

He studies her unblinkingly with lips parted as a little family of starlings twitter their good-mornings to each other on the nearby branches of a black alder. Time bounds away from them like a ball of string.

Already, she’s been with him two months.

“Had a lotta fun last night,” she tries to sound airy, but it comes out more like a whimper. She sits back on her heels, not at all surprised when the gusset of her little lace panties shift against her swollen folds and she finds herself sopping wet. Just from the looks of him standing there.

_Armitage._

_Beautiful, beautiful Armitage._

“Oh?” his cold, clearful eyes flicker over her body in a way that soaks her with warmth. It’s ridiculous, how he can make her heart skitter-patter just from a look. That shouldn’t be possible, not after all she’s done to and lived through with what feels like mostly all of the rich bastards in London.

She has no idea how to read this one, though. No idea what's going on behind those beautiful, frightening eyes.

She thinks about the things he did to her last night, sitting astride a cane-back chair inside his massive master closet in front of the full-length mirror. Her thighs spread wide apart over his, hands reaching back to touch his face and wind through his hair as he fucked her first with his long, thick fingers, fast and beautifully cruel, until she came all over his lap. Then with his big, fat cock – hard as steel and all them mean, blue-hued veins dragging hot and mangling inside her – while he made her watch. The things he whispered in her ear as he held her under her ribcage and moved her up and down when she got too weak to ride him, timing it with the thrust of his hips so that he struck her womb with every harsh return. The way she wilted back against his shoulder, whimpering and staring up into his eyes. How he kissed her tears away, telling her sweetly as he split her open and broke her apart, _That’s it, my dove, just a little longer. Look at you, taking all that cock. Such a good little girl._

 _Papa,_ she mewed. He told her to call him the very first time he fucked her, in a hotel suite on Whitehall in Westminster, while the lights of London reflecting off the water sparkled through the sheer drapes and outlined their shapes in the dark. Not _Daddy_ or _Master_ or _Sir,_ like the other sickos she’d fucked for.

_Papa._

It seemed like such a queer thing to ask at the time.

Now, after only eight weeks of this- this thing they do together, she wonders how she ever lived without it.

Without him.

“Yeah,” back inside the drawing room, she shrugs a shoulder. Miss Nonchalant.

“I see,” he says softly. His lips twitch at one corner.

“So,” she hopscotches her fingertips along the window sill, avoiding his eyes. It's the strangest sensation, feeling fluttery and shy with the bloke who fucks her in the ass twice a week. “I was thinkin’-”

“Oh dear,” he says, crossing his legs at the ankle, as if he’s settling in for the long haul.

“Chht," she flashes him a saucy look, then changes her tune to be pretty and soft, "May you _please_ play hooky today?"

She presses her palms together like she’s saying her prayers. "It’s gonna be such a pretty one, and I want to go to the butterfly gardens, to see if the dragon-snaps and the water lilies are open. Last time we went they weren’t bloomin’, but the lady at the ticket counter said if we came back after the rain the lily-flowers would be as big as my hand,” she cups her hand to show him, peeping under her lashes to check if he’s still listening to her.

He is. Raptly.

"So can we?" she balls her hands in her lap and bounces on her heels. "Pleeeease…"

“ _The butterfly gardens_ ,” he repeats with tacit amusement. There's a _flick-click_ , and then the crackle of tobacco burning as he lights a cigarette. A second later, the scent of clove and nicotine wafts over her. It makes her tummy go all woozy and calm.

Her john smokes a ciggie after every time he fucks her, lying in bed with her head on his chest over his heartbeat, arm bent to let the smoke drift up and away from her. She’s always almost-out by then, buzzing from her orgasms, cunny wet and warm and sore. She can taste the clove and sweetened paper as she kisses herself to sleep on his lips, and hear how the smoke deepens his murmur as he tells her, _Close your tired eyes, little dove._

“Sounds fascinating,” he says, twitching his eyebrows at her. He takes a long, slow drag and blows out the smoke through his nose. She hasn't fallen for the knight, she thinks. She’s in love with the dragon.

“And tell me," he flicks his ash into a vase of exotic flowers perched on a marble pillar next to the door, "what shall I tell my employer, when he asks?”

She snorts, _Easy._

“Tell ‘em it’s _classified,”_ using the line he always gives her whenever she asks about his job. She snickers and preens over her own clever joke.

He inclines his head indulgent-like. "Touché."

“And then I was thinkin’," she's feeling bold right now, if a bit breathless, "maybe you could take me to the market and I could get some stuff to make something."

"That's wildly specific."

"I dunno what- shrimps maybe? Or filet mignon? I’ve been watching a lot of them cooking-type shows lately, and I’m pretty positive I’m a chef, coz it all looks logical and I’m a logical person-”

He nods.

“And anyway, you were gone on Thursday and Friday for _confidential work_ ,” she’s still miffed about that, though now she’s ninety-nine percent positive he didn’t see another woman while he was away. But only because he fucked her four times in a row after he got back, the first time in the foyer with his keys dangling in the half-open door, and because later when he was sleeping she went through all his dress shirts to check for perfumes and lipsticks and stuff.

And found nothing, thank the bleedin' stars.

“So tech’nically," she cocks her head and gives him her pretty lash-flutter, "I hardly seen you. We should take some time to _reconnect_.”

Oh yeah, that’s a good line. She heard it on daytime tele.

“Ah,” he nods again. He's trying very hard not to grin as his hand holding his cigarette wavers between them, “And what we did together this week-end, that doesn’t count as _connection_?”

What did they do this weekend?

Oh yeah, breakfast fuck fuck walk in the park ‘til they got rained out fuck fuck in the shower fall asleep in his lap on the sofa while he typed something unbelievably fast on his laptop burn dinner fuck on the table until takeaway came feed each other with chopsticks fuck fuck fuck…

“No,” finally, she can look him straight in the eye as she shakes her head. “It doesn’t. Coz see, we were doing whatever we normally do, and that’s not _re_ -connection. We gotta go extra.”

He snorts around his cigarette. “My darling, if I go any more extra, I’ll go into cardiac arrest.”

“Please,” she rolls her eyes and levels him a look,  _Stupid,_ “you can’t get arrested for shaggin’.”

“You can if your girlfriend’s a prostitute.”

It lands across her face like a slap.

_Prostitute._

She reels, blinking fast against the swelling dawn and the hurt welling up in her chest. Someone whispers in her ear, Unkar maybe, or one of her foster-fathers lying next to her in the dark.

_Filthy. You're nothing-_

Before she can think, before she can _breathe_ , she is up, up, _up._

And out the door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Fuck you fuckin’ asshole-" she hits the corner breathless and hyperventilating, feet peddling at full tilt. She knows this fucker is _fast._

He’s caught her before.

“My darling,” sure enough _,_ he's right behind her, “I didn’t mean it like- it was in entirely poor taste and I apologize- Rey, stop-“

She cannot see through the terror that’s driving her onward. She patters blindly down the hall to the grand staircase that was the building’s only means of transportation up and down its floors, before the lifts were installed. What guides her is a bit like instinct, except a thousand times more rankling and painful than that.

_Get away get away get away get away-_

“ _I hate you_!” she screams.

She’s pretty sure she's talking to herself.

_Course he don’t want me who would you’re a silly stupid fuck up only good for one thing shut up and take it you know you like it worthless fuckin’ throw-away whore-_

Her little bare feet slap fast down circular flights of marble. Her heart pounds out of time with itself. He _never_ loved her. If she stays here one second longer, he’ll tell her so. She has to go. She has to go go go go go-

“Rey, _stop!”_

“Go tah hell!” she screeches back.

_Get out get out get out get out-_

“General?”

She nearly trips looking up through her hysteria to see one of the rich old ninnies who lives in his building paused at the polished mahogany banister with exactly half her rabbit-skin gloves on. A sleek leather leash slung over her wrist like an accessory ends at tiny toy poodle. It sticks its head through the gilded ironwork and wriggles frantically as it _yap-yap-yaps_.

The ninny clutches her pearls in exaggerated fright, gasping at the man Rey can _feel_ barreling down the staircase behind her, “What in heaven-”

“Please excuse us, Misses MacClare,” her john’s crisp callback is mismatched to the furious echo of his Ferragamos _pounding_ the marble behind her as he takes the stairs two-at-a-time. In the great cylindrical space, it sounds like a stampede of bulls.

She breaks into a panicked sprint.

“ _Rey_ ,” she feels his snarl in the ache in her lungs, all around her shattered heart, “damn it girl I said _stop_ -”

She shrieks as she leaps the last two steps and spills out into the lobby like a sobbing, heartbroken wretch. Because she is one.

The deskman at the reception booth is the carryover from the night shift. After two months, he's gone jaded to her antics, and so gives her only a curious glance, as if to ask, _Wassit this time, love?_

Behind her, her john jumps the whole bottom half of his last flight of stairs and lands hard on the marble, cursing as he spring-boards to carry his momentum through to a flat-out run.

She no match for him on a level playing field. She has to get out into the street.

Her gut churns, her heart scrabbles in her throat like she’s going to puke it up. She’s not running from him anymore, so much as every man and every mistake and every ugly scary moment when she realized all of them could just take whatever they want. Her bare feet beat her anthem against the polished tile-

_Bad girl bad girl bad-_

Through the wet, prisming light of tears and hysteria, she sees her freedom straight ahead, beyond the revolving glass door. An endless, harsh stretch of cold, grey street.

A hand suddenly appears in her periphery, making a quick snatch for her arm.

Like a child bolting across a car park into oncoming traffic, she weaves and shrieks, “No!”

“ _Rey, stop!_ ” he shouts, making another, more desperate grab for her. This time, he manages to catch the trailing gossamer tail of her nightgown just as she darts between the cycling panes of glass.

There’s a violent screech as her hem rips. He jerks back just in time to narrowly miss getting clocked in the nose.

Over her shoulder, she looks back see his face through the layers of fast-spinning glass.

Angular. Furious.

Devastated.

 _This is it_ , she thinks as her heart falls apart, _No going back._

The revolving door spits her out into the pitiless dawn.

She keens out at the street.

 _Stupid stupid stupid,_ she is so fucking _stupid_ for thinking he’d ever-

The world spins suddenly and turns upside. Her hands that were slapping her face hang down uselessly like a doll's.

Because she’s falling off the Earth, obviously. Her grief defies gravity, she is hurtling on a collision course into the sun-

Until a single sharp _swat_ on her bottom grounds her in reality. She heaves, as if the breath has been knocked back into her. A second _whap_ brings the street turned upside-down into focus. Her lungs relax. For what feels like the first time in full minutes, she can finally, _finally_ breathe.

_He's got me._

Her relief is drowned out by the rush of a delivery lorry suddenly barreling past them. She tastes its thick plume of exhaust. Just a few meters down the street, it’s wheels crush over a chip can. Crumbs burst like confetti at a children’s birthday party and cover the street.

_That could’ve been me._

The thought makes her want to throw up.

So does her john’s voice, usually so controlled and elegant, now shaking with high emotion.

“Are you insane?” he snarls. He wrenches her down off his shoulder and sets her flat-footed on cold cement walk. Her legs wobble and she toddles for the half-a-heartbeat it takes him to jerk her back into his arms. He crushes her into him, holding her for all he’s worth as he buries his fingers in her braid come loose and wild and wrings her closer still. “Are you mad? You _cannot do that_ -”

Behind her breast, her heart beats like a bird trapped under glass.

“I’m sorry, Ahm’tage-”

Her bleating is covered by the cackle of the starlings watching from their black alder bleachers above.

It’s mid-April in London. The chill of early spring still clings to the mornings, it bathes her feet and the backs of her legs in cold. The torn hem of her nightgown has ridden up to her thighs, she shivers from the chill and from the exhaustion.

He shifts his arms around her and burrows her deeper against his body.

She clings to his waist.

“I’m so sorry,” her heartbroken mews make him hold her tighter still. He’s going to crush her. It’s still not hard enough. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-”

“I love you,” he says into her hair. Then he lifts his face and closes his eyes and begs the sky. “God, girl. I love you and you break my fucking heart-”

All she can do after that is sob.

They stay that way, holding each other in a bruising grip, as the sun slips quietly over the cathedral and settles into its cradle in the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay listen, Linda. Linda- Linda listen.
> 
> This had to be more than two chapters. You knew it. I knew it. 
> 
> Armitage knows it...
> 
> Oh we're fucking in the next chapter, just so you know. And if you haven't read We Are No Ordinary Stars, weeeell…. What can I say? Yah girl loves those Daddy vibes, so. Yeah.


	3. I can see it in your eyes, 'cause they never tell me lies...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He may be Richard Gere 2.0, but she's nobody's Vivian Ward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read them tags, girl.

Now, that still don’t explain how a twenty-two year old tart from Brixton ended up in bed with the chief officer of domestic defense in the first place, does it?

Add to that a _married_ chief-of-defense.

No, to get that part, we have to go further back…

 

 

 

 

To say, 1989. When Alexandrea Niima gave birth at Queen Charlotte’s to a baby girl. At a whoppin’ one-point-eight kilos, she was more of a kitten really. And a sickly little thing at that. Half of her lungs didn’t work, and she couldn’t quite open her eyes.

Happens a lot when a mum delivers six weeks before she’s due. Happens a lot when she’s a druggie and a heavy drinker, too.

But then, most prostitutes are.

Regardless, Alexandrea Niima didn’t want her baby girl in the end. She took one look at that blind, mewling whelp covered in blood and blond fur – _Languno,_ the doctor called it, looking severely over his tortoise shell glasses, _common occurrence in undernourished prematures_ – and decided she hated it. Three days after her labor, she walked out of Queen Charlotte’s without her and never looked back.

The baby stayed inside of NICU for two months.

 _Rey_ , she came to be called. One of the nurses named her, a kindly Scotts-Irishman by the name of Ramsey, whose parents thought he was daft as all for becoming a baby-nurse instead of an auto-tradesman, like his Da. Something about that poor wee babe touched Nurse Ramsey’s soul, and never did he have a spare moment that he wasn’t sat beside her incubator, singing to her _Danny Boy_ and _Too Ra Loo Ra_ in a low, lilting murmur through the perforations in the plastic until she’d work her little tongue inside her mouth and coo. She was a pretty lassie, once all her fur finally dropped off and she could at last open her eyes. Snow-white and tender.

So, so tender.

In all his years as a baby-nurse, Ramsey’d never seen another babe ache so much for love. So he said it to all the other nurses, and to the social worker who came to collect the child when she was old enough to go to the state-home, and to his Ma and Da at Sunday dinner until they bleated at him to stop mentioning it, and finally, years later, to Misses Ramsey when they welcomed into the world the wee babes of their own.

No, never had he met a sweet little baby so needful of love in all his life.

 

 

But now I’ve taken you too far back.

Let’s go forwards say, twenty-two years?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first time she meets Tage, he’s a bit of a white knight...

 

 

 

“Goin’ out?”

It’s her flatmate, Rosie, standing in the doorway of their ratty old bath in a pair of bikini panties and a child-sized Power Ranger t-shirt that shows off her adorable pot-belly. Her hair’s in a messy topknot that fans itself out across her crown, she’s eating crisps outta the packet by pinching them one-at-a-time between just the tips of her long false nails.

Bare-faced and stoned outta her ever-lovin’ mind, she’s the most beautiful thing Rey’s ever seen.

Maybe because she’s the only person Rey’s ever loved.

“You look like a slut,” Rosie says, straight-faced. Behind her, over Madonna keening sweetly about girls-gone-bad from Rey’s phone, on the tube down the end of the dingy, carpeted hall, Rey can hear _The Little Mermaid_ going on full-blast.

She glances away from where she’s close up to the cheap, cloudy mirror over the sink basin putting on her eyeliner and meet’s Rosie’s blow-out eyes in the glass.

“Hope so,” she quips, just as deadpan.

A heartbeat, then the two of them burst out in a jaded laugh.

Couple of lost-girls, they are. Two fucked up peas in a trainwreck pod.

Soul mates for life.

She goes back to applying her kohl, careful to avoid looking herself in the eye as she explains, “Plutt rung me-”

“Fuffer,” Rosie snorts through a mouthful of salty crisps.

“Double-fuckah,” Rey agrees, thinking about how much she hates their pimp as she considers the collection of lipsticks they share between them, double- and triple-stacked on their bellies inside an old velvet-lined sweet box. A gift from one of their johns. Too long ago to remember for which girl, let alone from which john. “Says some bloke from the Royals rung up and bought me for the night.”

“Solo?”

“No, thank you _Jesus_ ,” Rey means it. She doesn’t think she could take another night of Ben fuckin’ Solo trying to bust through her cervix while waxing poetical in her ear about being the one to teach her where she belongs, and then sobbing hysterically into her shoulder about his dead Granddaddy after he comes all over her face.

No thanks. She’d rather throw herself in the Thames.

“S’a new bloke,” Rey holds two pale colors up to her lips, one after the other, unable to decide. “Plutt says he’s into that daddy-shit, like, real hardcore.”

All of Plutt’s girl got a reputation around the city. They do things the other girls don’t.

Rey hates her life. She hates it will all her heart.

Rosie rolls her eyes midst a luscious crunch and puffs, “Dif-gusfing.”

“Right?” Rey pauses to roll her lips over her teeth so she can over-line them. Shit, they’re going to need more Mac _Whirl_ soon. “Anyway, Plutt says he asked for somethin’ real babyish. Sweet and doll-like, he said.”

She leans back and smirks at her handiwork.

Babydoll, her big British ass.

She slides her hands slowly down the dangerously short black backless mini-dress she’s got on, the one that molds to her small body like a second skin so that even the outline of her belly ring shows, down to the cheapest pair of black fishnets she owns. She isn’t wearing a bra, her little pearl nipples are out to play through the thin rayon blend of the fabric. Her hair’s blown full-out, big like a beauty queen’s, and she’s wearing more dark shadow and black liner than Miss Lina Evangelista, thank you very much.

Fuck yeah, nineties bitch.

_Let ‘im suck on that._

Her little shoulder curls up under her chin, she flickers her long false lashes at Rosie as she wrings her hands together over her hip.

“Whattcha think?” she uses a breathless, mewling simper laced with cyanide. “Wanna buy me a lolly?”

Through her stupor, Rosie looks vaguely worried. “Rey. You know if he complains, Plutt’s gonna beat the shit outta you.”

The _again_ is implied in her now near-sober tone.

But Rey’s standing at that dangerous edge all girls like her come to in their pretty, pathetic lives. The one between scrambling to survive and total freefall. Seven years she’s been working for Plutt. Seven years since he found her huddled on the streets, a fifteen-year-old runaway with no money and no people.

Seven years, she’s been fucking for sick rich bastards in all the ritzy hotels in London, and what’s she got to show for it?

A few thousand pounds in the bank and a ruined soul.

 _And Rosie_ , she thinks, watching her roommate’s stoned eyes start to well at just the thought of Rey’s small, pale body covered in welts from Plutt’s belt.

“Lissen,” Rey winds her arms around the other girl’s neck and lays their foreheads together. She can smell the sweet, acidic scent of salt-and-vinegar crisps and Rose’s own cotton candy perfume. She can smell the love and the sadness and the desperation not to be left all alone, too.

She touches the tips of their noses together until Rose gives her a warbling smile and looks her in the eye.

“He ain’t gonna rat me out, cause I’m gonna fuck for him just how he likes. And then he’ll tip me, something real nice, and then you and me are goin’ to The Ivy for brunch. Like a couple’a _ladies_ ,” they snigger at the thought, “we’ll wear them big sunhats, the ones we bought on Firth ‘cause we thought they made us look like Kate Middleton?”

Rosie snorts and nods.

Rey doesn’t care if it smirks her foundation. “Whass the name of that waiter we think’s cute?”

“Hans,” Rosie cracks a wider smile.

So does Rey, at the memory of the shy German bloke who waited on them last time, a pair of pretty young prostitutes in tiny sundresses and huge floppy hats. She affects his accent, hocking at the _H_ , “Hans.”

For a moment they just stand there, two girls forming an island in the middle of a vast and endless sea. Rey’s hands holding her shoulders, Rosie’s arms around her waist with the chip bag dangling behind her. Eyes closed. Painting a life together of sunflower-filled days and starry nights.

“Gotta go, peaches,” it’s Rey’s voice, tender but mindful of the ticking clock, that cracks the silence. “Got a molly you can spare?”

“Yeah,” Rosie pecks her lips, and turns. “They’re in my bag.”

Her butt-cheeks peek out from the bottoms of her panties. They’re _Ninja Turtles,_ Rey notices.

_Classic Rose._

 

 

 

 

 

Rey’s flying on molls and reefer by the time the tube spits her out at Westminster Station.

Men stare at her tall velvet boots and black trench coat cinched tight around her little waist, her big Bridget Bardot hair and pale pink lips. Like a pack of dogs panting anxiously after a bitch, they howl at her.

But she doesn’t pay them no-nevermind.

She kitten-swaggers all the way to the lounge her john wants to meet her at, taking in the way the multicolored lights of the city and the lamps lining the walkways on either side of the river reflect in the shifting black waters of the Thames. How the air smells like cigarettes and street vendors cooking and like the wisteria trailing in long cat-tails from the baskets on the lampposts. And like pollution and ladies’ perfume and waffle cones and the crisp, clearful night.

Her heart beats out of time with the sharp _click_ of her stilettos against the stone and pavement, _ratta-tat-tatting_ faster than the speed of light.

It’s in these moments, between her miserable flat over Plutt’s office and lying flat on her back beneath some random bloke, that she feels like a free-girl. That she’s fully, fully alive.

The wind picks up, blowing crisp and scentless into her face. It’s May in the city, warm inside the sun-drenched days and cold always at night. She likes the way the air takes little bites out of her skin, sweet and harmless, like tiny fish nibbling the decay off her body. Making her shining. Making her new.

She ignores the catcalling of some loser-boys across the street and closes her eyes and opens her arms to the night, totally heedless of the passersby shifting grumbling and gawking around her. She takes a step on the pavement and spins, tails of her long cheap coat trailing her like an afterimage in a photograph, feeling her soul rise up through her body and drift beyond the city to smile down at her from its place beside the moon.

Oh yeah, she’s high as a bleeding kite.

Eyes still closed, she laughs wildly, wickedly. Like the heart-filled, heartbroken warble of a bird that knows it will never leave its cage, her call rises. She spins again, and again, faster and faster, chasing the rabbit-beat of her heart.

Until she _whaps_ right into something totally solid.

“Shit bugger all-”

She totters and starts to stumble when that solid-something wraps its arms around her waist and scolds her lightly, “Steady on.”

Her lashes flutter open, she’s nose-to-chest with the most sternly looking bloke she’s ever had the misfortune of mowing into. His cold, clear eyes peer down at her like a pair of backlit diamonds, the shadows slung under them and in the hollows of his sharp-featured face make him look like he’s come out the crypt just to chide her.

He is very, very tall. And, ‘less her eyes deceive her, _ridiculously_ ginger.

Which should diffuse the severity of his countenance, and for the sheer fact that it doesn’t, she fears him all the more.

“Wha- I- sorry,” she stammers, suddenly acutely aware of her hands holding onto his biceps. She squeezes a little and _whoa boy_ , he’s strapping alright. He hasn’t let go of his tight, two-handed grip on her waist, neither.

The streams of people on the walkway move around them without noticing, and she can’t help but feel bitter that they all like to stare until it’d be _helpful_ for them to.

_Well shit._

“Sorry,” she tries to wriggle out of his grasp, but it’s like being pinned by a tiger. She decides to switch tactics, puffing up to shout at him to take his filthy paws off her, but he takes the wind right outta her sails when he calls her-

“Miss Kira.”

That’s her working name. And if this bloke knows it, then he must be-

“Ahm’tage,” she struggles to wrap her mouth around his name. It’s not like any she’s ever heard before. “Ahm’tage… Hux?”

He nods.

 _Well, well,_ she thinks, eying him up again. _Innit this a nice surprise?_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“This ain’t a hotel.”

She peers suspiciously up at the warm, backlit wrought iron sign tucked in above a quaint hunter-green awning that curves over a wall of full-length windows glittering with the reflection of flickering candlelight from the tables within. The name of the place is French, a pair of words she could never pronounce.

“What keen powers of observation you possess, Miss Kira.”

He is standing beside her, a little too close to be courtly, far away enough not to loom. He’s taken his leather gloves off and is holding them in his hand folded benignly behind his back with the other. His strange, interesting eyes study the sign along with hers.

He looks patiently charmed.

She crosses her arms over her breasts and snorts. “You do realize you’re payin’ double.”

“How so?” he takes a quarter-turn so that he can look directly down into her face. She can’t see his expression, not really, when she’s still looking at the haughty metal script. But she can glimpse it, just out of the corner of her eye.

The way he looks at her is… strange. Like he’s… known her for a long time. But maybe not quite like that.

Jesus, she wishes she weren’t so high.

“Well,” she tucks her hands against her ribs to keep them warm and bobs her head at the sparkling glass, “ ‘less you wanna eat water and bread, you ain’t getting’ outta that place for less than a hundred quid-”

He nods, “Go on.”

“And. Well…” she looks at him finally, and shrugs, “that’s ‘bout what you’re paying per hour, when you buy the nightly rate. So…”

He quirks a flaming copper eyebrow, _So?_

She huffs and shrugs, “Don’t you wanna like, spend the time fuckin’? Least get your money’s-worth?”

His lips twitch. He licks the amusement off of them before he tells her, “I am touched by your concern. But one meal with you won’t bankrupt me, Miss Kira. Far from it.”

If that’s his way of telling her he’s filthy rich and stupid with his money, it’s working.

She’s in for a big tip alright. Thank the bleeding stars.

She’s already spending it in the shops on Bond Street as he opens the door and gestures for her to go in ahead of him.

“Fine, alright,” she smiles up in his direction over the tanned round of her bare shoulder as he slips off her coat. The gentle heat of the restaurants and its pale yellow lights and the quiet murmurs of its posh patrons soak her like a warm bath.

She closes her eyes and sighs, letting the soft jazz music sieve through her. It’s the kind of place she and Rosie only go to in their dreams. “Have it your way. Just don’t go ‘round telling blokes I fleeced yah.”

An amused snort of air tickles the baby hairs on her neck as his long arms wind solid and heavy around her waist. His lips, soft and dry except for their very seam, brush her skin as he speaks low into her ear.

“I am the lamb, then, in this scenario?”

There it is again, that tender, mild amusement in his voice. Coupled with his heavy arms holding her against him and his warm, barely wet lips on her neck, it makes her nipples tighten and ache inside her dress.

Wow, she must be really, _really_ high.

“Duh,” she says, smirking.

She feels another dubious snort, then he smiles against her shoulder.

‘kay, she can get through this.

_Show time._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In hindsight, the wine wasn’t her brilliantest idea.

The first glass of sweet, sharp white converts the pleasant buzz from the molly and the hit she took on her way out the door of whatever was in Rosie’s bong into a dark niggle in the pit of her stomach and all around her heart. The low murmurs of the other patrons take on a sinister tone, she can’t shake the feeling like someone is watching her. Like there are eyes in the flames of the candles and in the fairy lights strung up above. Her chest feels unbearably tight.

Halfway through her second glass, the wine starts to taste how she feels about her whole life.

Bitter.

“- and various other projects,” her john is saying from his seat across the table.

She studies him through the glittering lights, suddenly resentful of his decent looks and good manners and the way he speaks while looking calmly into her eyes. Like he hasn’t already paid her paid her pimp over a thousand pounds to do something sick to her after this little _date_. This _charade._

She hates him, she decides.

They’ve come to a painful lull in the conversation, clearly this fool is waiting for her to say something. Tell him how fascinatin’ he is or that he has an interesting job. _Oh please, tell me more about your work._

She smirks into her wine glass and asks, “S’is your first time?”

His head cocks. He’s slightly taken aback.

_Good._

“At Bon Pâté?” he quarries carefully.

“Nah,” she pops her tongue against the roof of her mouth and sets down her glass. “I mean with a call girl, love.”

Aw, look. He blushes.

_How cute._

The tables are waltzing now all around her as the floor starts to spin soft and slow beneath their feet, like the velvet turn of a vinyl record.

She clutches the tablecloth in both her hands and pants, terrified she’ll float away. Their dishes and silverware rattle, wine sloshes up the sides of her glass. Her john reaches to steady the candle at the center.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

There it is again, that intense, clearful stare.

 _Help me,_ she wants to say to him. _Help me get away._

But how can she, when he’s exactly what she wants to get away from?

“Do you-” he clears his throat and blinks rapidly at his plate a few times as he searches for something to say, “Do you attend university in the city?”

People as far as the other side of the dining room gasp and begin to whisper. _That’s_ how loud she’s laughing at him.

“Universi’y?” she holds her little belly and grins hatefully through the gleam prisming the lights in her eyes, “You think that’s what I’m doin’, payin’ for classes or some stupid shit like that? Like I’m going to medical school to be a rocket surgeon-”

She throws her head back as another cawing peal of contempt overtakes her. It feels so good, so freeing to laugh like this, to let out the raw ache somewhere other than into her pillow in her room after she’s sure Rosie’s gone to sleep. She laughs like they’re going to take her laughter away from her. Like this is her very last chance to laugh.

The dining room is buzzing with shocked, nervous chatter. Stupid little busy-bees whipping up around their hives. But her john doesn’t seem as bothered as all the rest. He just looks…

Concerned.

That, or he’s saving it all up for when he beats her later in the hotel. Now _that’s_ a sobering thought. Or it would be, if she wasn’t jamming on weed and amphetamines and wine.

Oh yeah, she’s cooking alright.

Still, with the echo of a warning ringing inside her skull, she sits up straight as she can and fans herself sloppily with the real linen napkin from her lap as she tries to stem her lunatic giggles with long blows of air through her pursed lips.

She can’t look at him, with his cold, sad eyes, or she’ll start all over again.

“Sorry,” her face is red-hot. She feels it when she touches her cheek with the back of one hand. Her mouth is painfully dry. “Sorry. S’just, the things you lot tell yourselves to make it alright-”

Like a flock of startled starlings, another burst of laughter breaks loose from her chest.

She claps a hand over her mouth.

Her john gets up and comes round the table and kneels down by her side. His big hand cups her face.

She’s hot _and_ wet.

 _It’s not laughter this time_ , a distant part of her realizes.

She’s sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” she gulps. The sight of her food half-eaten on her plate in front of her makes her sick. Plutt will beat her to an inch of her life when he finds out about this. “I’m so, so sorry, Mister Hux- Ahm’tage, I-”

“It’s perfectly alright,” he soothes as one of his arms slips around her. Very gently, he takes her hand. “Can you stand?”

“I think so-”

“Up we go, then. Nice and slow. Ah-ah, slowly. That’s the way.”

Her legs shake like a newborn lamb’s as he guides her up onto her feet. She has to hold onto his lapel and lay her head against his chest just to stay standing as he peels a few notes off the neat roll from his pocket and lays them on the table.

“No,” she murmurs weakly, awash in guilt and the fear of what Plutt will do to her, “Lemme pay-”

“Nonsense.”

As if they’re in a slow-dance, he works her carefully towards the door.

The faces of the guests melt and blur as they pass by, turning malevolent and hellish in the flame of the candlelight. The host’s face becomes a terrifying whirl of frowns and shadows while they wait to collect their coats.

“I think… I’m havin’ a… really bad trip, maybe…”

“Yes,” his mild agreement vibrates his chest, “I believe you’re right.”

She hides her face in his shirt and mewls.

“There now,” his hand strokes soft and reassuring over her hair.

“She’s having a bad reaction to some cold medicine,” he tells the host as he accepts his coat and hers.

Rather than help her into her trench coat, he simply bundles her in both and shuffles her still sheltered inside the circle of his arms into the cold, calming night.

“Oh thank God,” she sighs up at the cool dark. The air stings her cheeks where they’re wet with her tears, it’s refreshing after the stale heat and oppressive stares inside the restaurant.

She takes a deep, shuddering breath and feels some of the tension in her chest unwind.

“Do you need a hospital?”

She opens her eyes – when did she close them? – and remembers he’s there.

“Oh, no. No,” she pats his chest, like she’s reassuring a dog, “I just- it was too noisy and crowded and I- I don’t normally drink when I’m workin’-”

“Mm, no,” he lilts her chin just a little with the side of his finger so that he can examine her eyes by the street light. “You wouldn’t, would you? It makes for a nasty cocktail with the drugs, I imagine.”

She tries to slap his hand away, but she’s too weak. She ends up holding his wrist as she glowers up at him like a kitten he’s flicked in the nose.

A very high kitten, mind.

“I _can_ work,” she spits, swaying in what she prays is a haughty way, “Don’t gotta be sober to suck cock.”

His lips twitch. “I wouldn’t know.”

She stumbles back from him half-a-step and snorts. “Oh look, he’s ‘andsome _and_ a comedian. Brilliant.”

She flings out her arms. “S’my lucky night.”

He catches her around her waist before she tumbles on her ass into the street.

“I believe,” he starts, in that insufferable upper-Westside-proper, smirking openly at her now, “If you still have this much cheek in you, you’re fit to go home and sleep it off.”

With that, he tucks her in against his side and signals out at the lights. “Taxi-”

“Whoa-whoa-whoa, lissen ‘ere now,” she smells what must be him in his dress shirt and in the thick wool collar of his coat that surrounds her. A clean, woodsy scent, like aftershave and clove. It’s like a balm, soothing her nerves splaying rapidly at their split ends. She tips her chin up, glaring at his sharp profile. The street lamps glint off the copper of his closely-cropped hair and make a halo around him.

He ain’t gorgeous.

He _ain’t._

“You come ‘round complainly and Plutt’s gonna beat the fuck outta me-”

He looks down at her as a cab sluices up through the damp on the pavement. One eyebrow arches elegantly at the finger she flaps in his face.

“So you gotta get your money’s worf, alright? Cause be it on your stupid head if I-”

He cuts her off with a kiss under the glaze of the street lights.

It feels like the first kiss of the rest of her life.

Their lips peel apart in slow-motion. All the disparate parts of her soul float down and settle together like silt at the bottom of still water as she stares up into his pale blue eyes.

His thumb chases the curve of her cheek.

“Oy-oy!” calls the driver from the window of his taxi. “You two love-birds gettin’ in or what?”

He steps away to help her into the cab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ride to her apartment is totally silent.

They don’t wear seatbelts, and they don’t sit apart. Rather, they gather in the center, like two opposite magnets too strongly attracted to stay apart. His arm stays firm around her, her face is half-hidden in his dress shirt.

The fingers of her left hand play with his right, lacing and unlacing and straining along to measure their lengths against each other. Her whole hand seems to fit inside his palm.

Neither of them speaks. Not even after she lifts her head to peck softly at his lips.

He returns her kisses in kind, trailing tender touches all over her body with his fingers still threaded through her own. Time doesn’t seem to exist for them, as the lights from the city sweep over them in slanted, fragmented bands through the windows. Each time they touch his eyes, they look mirrored from behind, silver instead of blue, glowing like a cat’s in the near-dark.

She is still very, very stoned.

She wishes she wasn’t, as she presses her tongue into his mouth and his hand winds itself inside her hair. She can’t tell if this- the slipperiness between her thighs and the feeling of her heart beating all over her body right beneath her skin – is really _real_.

He leads her up to her apartment by her hand.

The lamp in Plutt’s office is switched off, which means her pimp is out for the night, prolly to rove the streets looking for more lost-girls. The thought falls through her as Armitage helps her upstairs with his hand at the small of her back.

His touch is reassuring, and warm.

At the top, he presses her up against the wall next to her door and kisses her deeply. Not like some john she’s cheated out of a night of fucking, neither, but like they’re old lovers sharing a long goodbye.

She doesn’t want to let go of his shirt.

Not even when Rosie opens the door in her turtle knickers and Power Rangers t-shirt, holding her phone and a kitchen knife.

“Wotcher?” she menaces in her American accent.

Rey presses her forehead to Armitage’s and laughs.

“She don’t like strangers,” she tells him, looking again into his cold, mysterious eyes.

“Smart girl,” he murmurs. Then he tells Rosie, “She’s had two glasses of Chassagne and a crying-jag, and not much to eat. I think she should sleep.”

Rosie crosses her arms as best she can with a knife. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothin’,” Rey closes her eyes and croons up at the ceiling, “he ain’t done nothing to me an’ that’s. the. problem,” she boops him on the nose. Then she wheedles him like a child, “Come inside-”

“Not tonight, my angel,” he lets Rosie peel her gently off and away with her hand not holding the kitchen knife. He gives her a wry half-smile before the sight of him disappears around her dingy doorjamb.

“Jesus Rey, only you,” Rosie mutters as she shuts the door and does the deadbolt and chain.

Rey’s heart pounds. She feels wild, uncontainable, like she’s about to fly right up out of her skin into the stars.

“C’mon!” she fumbles out of Rosie’s loose grip and out of her velvet boots, sagging where she folds over hop-stumbling to half-unzip them one after the other before shimmying and kicking them off on her way to her bedroom, “C’mon, Rose! Hurry up!”

“For what, baaabe?” Rose whines.

The window next to her bed is almost completely painted shut, but Rey just manages to shove it up with the heels of her hands and then her shoulder high enough so that she can lean out it into the crisp, glowing night.

There he is, down there on the street getting into the open backseat of the taxi.

“Ahm’tage!”

He turns and looks up.

“I love you!” she waves her arms like he’s setting out to sea. Then she flashes him, “I love you, Ahm’tage!”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Rosie hisses behind her, trying to haul her in by the back of her dress, “are you fucking _high_?”

“So high,” Rey preens, smug as anything as she falls topless back into her room on her bed beside Rose.

Because he lifted his hand and waved before he slipped into the cab.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay okay OKAY - I know I said sexing in this chapter, but it was getting *ridiculously* long. Next one, I swear.
> 
> Do you feel it comin', babe?
> 
> Let me know what you thought of this one. I can't tell if I've gone fully off the deep end, or if this is my favorite chapter of anything I've ever written.
> 
> Eat. Pray. Pastel.

**Author's Note:**

> Your comments and kudos are always, always appreciated.
> 
> If you want to be besties, find me on Tumblr: https://royramsey.tumblr.com/


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